"doesn't mean that we've somehow lost the technology to do so"
I can think of two examples.
The LM had some truly weird chemical milling technology invented mostly because they didn't have the CNC mills and CNC EDM gear we have today. Design and production floor feed back on each other and some design decisions were optimized to production realities such that you could at enormous expense either reinvent the chemical milling processes or simulate them with EDM and/or CNC mills but it would be enormously cheaper to scrap the design for a chemically milled door or whatever and replace it with a door designed specifically to match the modern technologies of EDM and milling machines.
The other example I can think of is I don't think we have the tech anymore to make aerospace grade core memories. Too much info was in the brains of people who died decades ago. To a first approximation the cost would be something like the entire fixed capital expenses of the whole computation industry from 1940-1960 plus many man years of R+D and more importantly reverse engineering and reinventing the QA/QC that man rated aerospace grade core memory would require. It would be a heck of a lot simpler and cheaper to use modern tech.
There is an obvious computing analogy. For a good time check out the "soylent news" project as in soylentnews.org who spent weeks re-implementing modperl 1.0 and apache 1 and all that so as to re-implement /. using the last public release of slash code. Its non-trivial to bring up old software while simultaneously applying a decade or two of security patches and best practices.
I meant that statement in the sense of it's not really as if we've lost the knowledge from some golden age of engineering. I'm guessing it would be enormously difficult and expensive to build an IBM 360 as well. (Or, if that's not a good example for some reason, certainly any number of other obsolete computer systems.) But people don't normally lament the fact that we can no longer manufacture a 1960s-era computer.
But, that said, fair comment. It's the reason that there are always various military projects ongoing to basically replace old technology (such as guidance systems) with modern tech. Not necessarily to upgrade capabilities, but simply because we can't build the old stuff any longer.
I can think of two examples.
The LM had some truly weird chemical milling technology invented mostly because they didn't have the CNC mills and CNC EDM gear we have today. Design and production floor feed back on each other and some design decisions were optimized to production realities such that you could at enormous expense either reinvent the chemical milling processes or simulate them with EDM and/or CNC mills but it would be enormously cheaper to scrap the design for a chemically milled door or whatever and replace it with a door designed specifically to match the modern technologies of EDM and milling machines.
The other example I can think of is I don't think we have the tech anymore to make aerospace grade core memories. Too much info was in the brains of people who died decades ago. To a first approximation the cost would be something like the entire fixed capital expenses of the whole computation industry from 1940-1960 plus many man years of R+D and more importantly reverse engineering and reinventing the QA/QC that man rated aerospace grade core memory would require. It would be a heck of a lot simpler and cheaper to use modern tech.
There is an obvious computing analogy. For a good time check out the "soylent news" project as in soylentnews.org who spent weeks re-implementing modperl 1.0 and apache 1 and all that so as to re-implement /. using the last public release of slash code. Its non-trivial to bring up old software while simultaneously applying a decade or two of security patches and best practices.